holocaust

1942 graffiti on a Jewish shop that reads, “Palestine calls, Jews not tolerated in Norway”.

Imagine that your parents and the majority of everyone they knew had all been systematically been massacred by a particular sect when you were a kid. Imagine you grew up in a family that was utterly traumatised by this massacre and was determined to avoid anything similar ever happening again. Imagine that growing up with that collective memory and grief had messed you up and you became an abuser towards others in an attempt to secure what was left of your family. Imagine that loads of people rightly protested this but deliberately taunted you by comparing you to the people who had committed that massacre, traumatising you over and over, choosing words and images to make it hurt as much as possible, claiming it was justified to “trigger” (that’s the word, isn’t it?) you over and over again because you were a bad person who just deserves it.

And now imagine that you had cousins and friends who had also seen the generation before them massacred, but who didn’t agree with your actions. Imagine that they also had to deal with the fallout from your abusive acts by being constantly subjected to comments, photos, and images comparing you, their friend or relative, to the sect who had systematically massacred everyone they had known and loved as well. Who had nothing to do with any of it but just had to put up with this torrent of horrible imagery and hate, aimed at them, their friends, and their families. And any time they objected, were told that no, it was ok, they were just trying to deliberately traumatise your friend, because he was a bad person and it’s ok to try to emotionally torture people with their past if you don’t like them. [click to continue…]

A year and a bit ago, I published a post on a guy called Roger Hayes, who runs the British Constitution Group, which is dedicated to pretending that our current legal system contravenes the legal system that went before it and it’s therefore illegal, and that why they shouldn’t have to pay council tax.

Then Roger Hayes tried not to pay his council tax, and the court he didn’t recognise imprisoned him. A bunch of his followers went apeshit and claimed that this was an attempt by the British government to silence the truth of their illegitimacy and operate a secret trial system to suppress political dissidents.

This story kept showing up in my Facebook news feed because I am friends with a bunch of people who a) believe in the legalisation of cannabis who also b) believe in a whole bunch of other things like aliens building the pyramids, vaccines, sugar and aeroplane vapour trails containing poison, and putting “of the name” before your surname means somehow the law doesn’t apply to you anymore.

I therefore wrote to Wirral Council to ask them the background to this story in an effort to get to the bottom of what had really happened. Their reply, that Roger Hayes had experienced exactly the same judicial process that every non-council taxpayer does, was then published on my website here. The comments on this article are some of the craziest stuff I have ever read. People seem unable to decide whether council tax is illegal, unfair or optional, they just know that I am definitely, definitely wrong. On what I am wrong, they are also unclear.

Last month, the comments started up again in earnest, about how I’m really wrong and selfish because I think it’s a good idea to pay public sector worker’s pensions etc. Today, someone called Tom posted about how I’ve been censoring comments because they were unable to post twice and this was evidently due to me deleting their comments, as well as repeatedly calling my blog “idiotic”. [click to continue…]